Hughie Lamb and Brian Jones

HUIE LAMB TAKES TO THE SKY IN THE T6 WITH PILOT INSTRUCTOR BRIAN JONES

T6 Harvard pilot and instructor Brian Jones takes a former American P 51 pilot Huie Lamb back for a nostalgic trip down memory lane in the skies of England. Former wartime pilot Huie was based at the famous Battle of Britain airfield, Duxford during WW2 where he flew P-51 Mustangs and P-47 Thunderbolts.

Here is a very short but remarkable story which involved Huie Lamb during WW2. This story is curtesy of the CNN news blog.

During World War II more than 16-million American service members would be part of the fight. This is a story about two of those men. On December 29th, 1944. Lt. Huie Lamb, Jr. was flying missions in his P-51 escorting bombers over Germany. The 20 year old Texan was in the U.S. Army Air Corps operating out of Duxford Air Force Base in England.

Huie’s P-51 is named after his little sister.

One day Lamb’s wing man lost use of his radio. Lamb was escorting the wing man back to Duxford when something went wrong over the North Sea. Lamb’s plane lost coolant and caught fire. What should he do? He was too far from land to glide in. His next choice was to head into the wind and ditch the plane into the sea. By the time Lamb got his canopy open, it was too late to bail out. He slammed into the sea with his P-51. Fortunately for Lamb, Lt. John “Wild Bill” Crump was flying nearby.

Before I go on with Lt. Lamb’s story, here’s the shaggy dog, or to be more precise, the shaggy coyote story about Wild Bill Crump and his companion Jeep. Jeep was a coyote pup Crump found and adopted as a pet during flight training in Nebraska. When Crump was sent to England in 1944 to join the fight, he smuggled Jeep aboard the Queen Elizabeth in an empty gas mask case. Jeep even flew missions with Crump during the war.

Photo Courtesy Huie Lamb.

Lt. “Wild Bill” Crump, who was flying his P-51 nearby, saw Lt. Lamb’s plane crash in the North Sea and called a “may day” for help. An amphibious plane was dispatched and Lamb was plucked from his disabled plane. Lt. Crump helped move him from the plane to a waiting ambulance.

Lamb told me that he was surprised his only injuries were hypothermia and a split lip. He got stitches and after a few days recuperating he was back flying missions. When I spoke with Huie Lamb Sunday evening he told me he never got to meet Crump face to face before he died last year but he talked with the fellow WWII vet on the phone several times. Lamb put it this way, “Bill Crump was an amazing man, not just because of what he did to save me.”